Trade with Turkey, one of Syria’s largest trading partners until last year, continued to dive and fell some 67 percent on an annual basis in the first half of this year, in line with the decline witnessed in the first three months of 2012.

The rising violence of the last week took its toll on the Syrian Pound which crossed the level of 70 pounds per dollar in the black market and remained above that level at the beginning of this week in spite of some small gains.

Mohammad Jleilati, the Minister of Finance, has said that his government was finalising discussions with Russia to print money there, a move that signals a potentially growing economic dependency of the Syrian government towards Moscow.

The Ministry of Economy has announced that within a week it will publish a compulsory price list for key commodity items as the Government tries to calm rising anger over the continuing increase in consumer prices.

The state-owned General Organisation for Textile Industy has contracted with an Iranian company to export some USD 30 million worth of yarns, a deal that would represent three times Syria’s 2010 exports to Iran.

The Syrian Government has raised customs tariffs on a wide range of consumer goods, reverting further a decade-old policy of trade liberalisation and risking an additional increase in consumer prices in the local market.

Syria and Iran will start applying on March 21 a bilateral preferential trade agreement, a deal the Syrian Government hopes will increase exports and partly reverse the impact of the steep decline in foreign currency earnings it is facing.

Syria’s trade with Turkey fell 15 percent last year over the political unrest and the suspension of the free trade agreement linking the two countries although until the third quarter of 2011 year-on-year figures remained stable.

Imperial Tobacco and JTI, two of the largest global tobacco firms, have acknowledged that their operations had been impacted by the unrest in Syria and the sanctions imposed by the EU and US on Syrian individuals and companies.

Updated January 30: Exports of crude oil and related products represented almost half of all Syrian export revenues in 2010 – from a third in 2009 - a figure that confirms the significant impact that the ban imposed by the EU and other western countries on oil exports is having on the country’s foreign currency earnings.

The agreement establishing a Preferential Trade Area between Iran and Syria entered into force last week after the Iranian Parliament approved the bill for that purpose, at a time sanctions are having an increasingly serious impact on the Syrian economy.

Updated November 21: The consumption of heating oil in Syria jumped last month as the coming winter season is leading a growing number of Syrians to store the product, while attacks on the distribution network are also disrupting supplies.

Syria’s inflation rate remained largely under control in the last few months, according to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, although figures are not yet available for the period that followed the temporary import ban.

Only a few days after it imposed a wide scale ban on imports, the Syrian government reversed its decision, confirming that it had no clear economic strategy without dispelling fears on the state of the country’s foreign currency reserves.